This dissertation investigates welfare creation and leadership from a radically
processual thinking as a basis of imagining other conceptual horizons than the
ones feeding current governmental rationalities. It basically argues that since
welfare is not an entity delivered, but is continuously becoming in an unfolding
middle between managers, employees and citizens, we need to go beyond
conceptual frameworks that draw their assumptions from a thinking which
basically treats welfare as a thing.
The dissertation therefore starts out by denaturalizing the assumptions and
divisions of an entitative, extensive reasoning and discusses how this thinking
frames the idea of creation in a welfare context. This leads to a discussion of the
idea of welfare creation as the realization of a mental model: Here, the dissertation
locates as a problem that when ‘the new’ is placed in changing mental models of
practice, creation tends to slip out of practice. Creation then becomes a matter of
separating oneself from the situation in order to be able to decide upon a new way
to relate to practice at a time and space distance of it. So, at the same time as
creation slips out of practice, the relational also slips out of creation.
In an attempt to push back together what has been split in this reasoning, the
dissertation activates process philosophy as a lever of imagining other conceptual
frames of welfare creation - how welfare creation may be thought radically
relationally-processually beyond the idea of realization a mental model.
By taking the path from Bergson’s distinction between intensive and extensive
multiplicity to Brian Massumi’s concept of newness and the deleuzian-spinozian
concept of affect, the dissertation aims to carve out a notion of creation that can be
helpful in this endeavor.